I live in two worlds simultaneously.
One is quiet. Things move at their own pace. The light falls the way it falls. The kitchen needs cleaning. The laptop is old. The world outside the window does not perform for anyone.
The other world is the internet, frantic, curated, increasingly unreal. And the contrast between these two worlds made me see something I had always been doing, but had never named.
Around 2022, AI-generated images began flooding the visual landscape. What struck me immediately was not their sophistication, it was their predictability. The vast majority were caricatures of Surrealism. Soft. Dreamlike. Spectacular. A visual language that had already been slowly suffocating under filters and retouching now faced a full assault.
Filters had been quietly blurring reality for years. AI finished the job.
Easy Realism is not a reaction. It is an observation.
For the last two hundred years, art fought hard to escape reality, or to claim its own version of it. Surrealism, abstraction, conceptualism, postmodernism. Each movement wrestled with what the real was and what it wasn't.
Every avant-garde declared the image liberated. Every filter proved it wasn't. And now a prompt does in seconds what took movements decades.
AI has made that struggle absurd. Now everyone has their own reality. Everyone with a sentence to type can generate an image. The tools of visual fiction are democratised. All of it, every movement that ever fought for a new vision of the world, is now clowned by a prompt.
What remains is the thing nobody is making anymore: the ordinary.
You, sitting at your aging laptop in your kitchen that needs cleaning, dishes in the sink, telling the world everything is fine. Filtering your selfie. Generating the images of your life.
That is the new normal. And it was always partly true, people have always curated their image. But now it is universal. Now it is seamless. Now the gap between the lived reality and the shown reality is wider than it has ever been.
And the doubt that follows, was this real? Did this actually happen? Is this a photograph or a generation? That doubt is only beginning.
I am not against any of this. I don't find it threatening. I find it interesting, although it scares the hell out of me.
I learned by imitating others, absorbing influences, processing them into something of my own. That is how every artist works. AI does the same, faster, at scale.
But I also think we will miss the other thing.
Not in a nostalgic way, Easy Realism has nothing to do with nostalgia. It is not about film versus digital. Not about slow versus fast. I work digitally since it became possible. Before that, like everyone else, I shot on film. I ran an FTP server before there was a graphical browser, offering downloadable kits of my work. In 1993 I was the first Dutch artist to receive a working grant from the Fonds voor de Kunst, now the Mondriaan Fund, on the basis of nothing more than a printed-out website. The medium is not the point.
The point is the unedited moment. The unimproved reality.
I photograph by improvising. I am not very well prepared: I know the next two steps, and then I am completely free, or lost. I have to make a great many mistakes before I make a good photograph. I let my brain, my intuition, surprise me.
I cycle through Paris and stumble onto a scene. I see a situation forming on the street that reminds me of a painting I once stood in front of in the Louvre. I notice the way two objects sit next to each other in the house where I live, and the meaning that quietly accumulates between them.
None of this is planned. None of it is optimised. The angle is sometimes wrong. The light is what it is. The people are ordinary, thin, fat, badly dressed, wonderful alive.
I once found a photograph of the opening of a small parking lot at a minor local attraction. A few local dignitaries cutting a ribbon. Amateurish framing. Unremarkable people. Everything slightly off.
That is Easy Realism.
And photographs like that are going to disappear. Not because no one will take them, but because no one will let them exist unimproved. Every imperfection is now correctable. Every ordinary moment is now upgradeable.
Easy Realism is a future rarity.
Not yet. But soon.